Ron Nevison, a young American who'd never worked on a major album before, was engineer for most of Quadrophenia's sessions. Yet though it had a somewhat mixed reception upon its release, in part because of the unavoidable comparisons to Tommy, Quadrophenia ultimately endured as one of the Who's most significant works. There were also attempts to make the album itself quadraphonic that couldn't come off, more due to the shortcomings of quadraphonic home equipment than the band's own capabilities. For a 1973 recording, it was complex, involving not just the band's usual power trio-plus-vocals format, but much in the way of synthesizers, horns, and sound effects. The recording of Quadrophenia was, like most of the Who's projects, fraught with lurches, calamities, and struggles to fit the limits of the era's technologies and market realities into Townshend's outsized conceptual ambitions. Nor was it absent of the ambivalent spiritual redemption found by the protagonist of Tommy, though the hero's journey toward it in Quadrophenia is more subtle. Yet Quadrophenia was similar to Tommy, and much of what the Who had done back to 1965, in its focus on a misfit in search of identity, torn between a wish to fit in and untamed nonconformity.
Quadrophenia the who mod#
The journey of its protagonist through mid-1960s British mod culture was very much the same as the one the Who and their original audience had made, unglorified and speckled with frustration and failure. Where much of Tommy's story verged at points on fantasy fiction, Quadrophenia was an earthy excavation of the very roots of the Who's history.
In some ways, Quadrophenia was quite different from Tommy. The other, Quadrophenia, was issued as a double album in fall 1973. One of them, Lifehouse, failed to reach completion, though its most commercial songs formed the bulk of their 1971 album Who's Next. The Who, and particularly their principal songwriter and visionary Pete Townshend, would also use the rock opera as a vehicle for two equally ambitious projects. Released in 1969, Tommy remains the most successful rock opera, and indeed one of the only rock operas to become both a commercial smash and an artistic triumph. In the early 1970's, the Who were in the difficult position of trying to follow up a massively successful album with something just as titanic, but different enough to maintain their position as innovators. Perfect Sound Forever: The Who's Quadrophenia- interview with engineer ROn Nevison The Who's Quadrophenia Ron Nevison Interview
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